When the evening declines to end
It happens most often on a Thursday. Dinner for six has gone beautifully, the restaurant has begun stacking chairs, the bar downstairs has turned loud, and nobody at the table wants to be the first to say goodnight. Upstairs, the suite has a sitting room that nobody has used all week. Carrying the evening up there turns a dinner into something close to an old London salon: fewer people, better chairs, and a conversation that can finally stretch its legs.
Done well, it is the most civilised hour of a trip. Done carelessly, it is a call from the night manager before one o'clock. The difference lies almost entirely in preparation, and most of it happens before the first course is served.
A word with the duty manager first
Hotels are easy about a few friends in a suite and uneasy about anything that sounds like a party. Telephone the duty manager or the concierge during the afternoon, mention that you may bring five or six guests up after dinner for drinks, and ask two things: whether the sitting room shares a wall with a neighbouring bedroom, and whether the house has any rule about visitors after midnight. Several of the grand hotels on Park Lane keep suites designed for precisely this kind of evening, with a dining table, a bedroom behind its own door and a corridor that sees little traffic, and they will tell you so.
If the suite you have taken backs onto another room, ask whether a quieter one is free for the night. It is an ordinary request and costs nothing to make.
Ordering upstairs before sitting down downstairs
In-room dining is at its best when it has warning. Place the order before you leave for dinner, with a time attached: a cold plate or two, cheese, petits fours, something warm for whoever skipped dessert. Ask for proper glassware rather than the minibar tumblers, coupes or flutes for champagne, heavy glasses for whisky, wine glasses for anyone who prefers red. Ask for two ice buckets, more water than seems necessary, extra chairs if the sitting room only seats four, and for the table to be laid and the staff to withdraw once everything is in place.
Hotels that attach a butler to their suites will do most of this unprompted; tell the butler roughly when you expect to return and leave the room in their hands. Bottles are better ordered through the hotel than carried up from a shop, partly as a courtesy and partly because the glasses, the ice and the clearing away arrive with them.
The hostess at your side
A salon needs a host, and a host with five guests to look after cannot also keep every glass full, introduce every newcomer and draw in the quiet one by the window. This is where a companion earns her place in the evening. She greets people at the door beside you, remembers the names from dinner, notices the colleague standing alone and starts him talking about something he genuinely cares about. When the talk flags she turns it; when it grows heated she cools it with a question.
Michelle has a born hostess's instincts and takes mixology seriously, and has been known to commandeer a suite's drinks tray and produce a round of classics while everyone else is still choosing a chair. Rosa makes a hotel sitting room feel lived in within ten minutes; people laugh sooner around her and leave later. Both belong among the curvaceous companions, and both enjoy an evening in which the guest list, rather than the room, is the point.
For a larger party, two companions who already know each other can share the hosting between them, an arrangement Cressida describes on the duo evenings page.
Volume, windows and the corridor
Music helps a salon and spends a hotel's goodwill quickly. Keep it at restaurant level, play it through a small speaker in the sitting room rather than the television, and switch it off rather than down when the conversation is good. Windows onto the lane can stay shut, since the traffic outside is louder than any gathering. The real danger is the corridor. Goodbyes said in an open doorway and laughter on the way to the lift are what neighbours actually hear, so say farewells inside the suite and let people leave two at a time.
Should the hotel ring about noise, apologise, lower everything and thank them for the call. It rarely happens when these points are kept, and a gracious answer means it will not happen twice.
The night, hour by hour
No two gatherings run alike, but most good ones follow roughly this shape.
Sending word to Cressida
Tell her the hotel, roughly how many guests, and the character of the evening, whether colleagues, old friends or a mixture of both, and she will suggest a companion who enjoys a room of six rather than a table for two. Your companion's time begins when she arrives, often at the restaurant, so a late dinner followed by the suite sits comfortably inside three hours at £1,500 or the four hour dinner length; both figures appear among the published rates, while the booking page describes the single check Cressida makes before your companion leaves.
For how she reaches a suite on a floor that needs a key, see the note on private entrances and club floors; for an evening that ends in a bar rather than upstairs, the second venue.
Asked at the table
If she wishes to, a glass or two, as any guest might. Many companions prefer to host with one glass that lasts an hour, and nobody at the gathering should press her to do otherwise.
If her time allows and she is happy to, yes. Mention beforehand that the night may run long, so that Cressida arranges the right length from the start rather than extending it at two in the morning.
By her first name, as a friend joining you for the evening. That is all anyone needs to know, and it is all she will say about herself.
Written by Cressida, Membership secretary at Berkeley Square Society. To turn any of this into an evening, write to the desk.
Send word
